Bobby: Emilio Estevez's political microcosm in time

12 June 2015 • 6:39pm

Weaving together 22 storylines is no small feat and director Emilio Estevez does so with honorable intentions in Bobby, says Natalie Wain

In the early hours of June 5, 1968, Palestinian refugee Sirhan Sirhan shot Senator Robert F Kennedy – younger brother of murdered President John F Kennedy – at an election party in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles.

Bobby, as he was affectionately known, died in hospital 26 hours later, plunging millions of liberal-minded Americans into despair.

The 16 hours leading up to the assassination provide the backdrop for auteur Emilio Estevez’s ambitious 2006 period drama Bobby. It follows 22 individual character stories set in a fragile America, where the protagonists represent many of the struggles facing the divided nation.

Estevez’s interconnecting storylines are unified by the assassination of Kennedy that night, but Bobby is as much a story about hope, love, fear and regret as it is about the murder of a man that many hoped would be the next president of the United States.

America – divided we stand

Estevez’s decision to fictionalise the characters in Bobby allowed him freedom to explore the multiple narratives he established early on. If the Ambassador Hotel represents fractured America, then its employees and temporary inhabitants represent the diverse and divided population.

We have Sir Anthony Hopkins as the elderly former doorman caught in the merry-go-round of his golden years; Demi Moore as an alcoholic lounge singer who treats her long-suffering husband and manager – played by Estevez – with contempt, while Lindsay Lohan is cast as a young idealist, set to marry her dead boyfriend’s brother (Elijah Wood) in a bid to prevent him from being sent to Vietnam.

“Below stairs” – or in this case, the hotel’s kitchen – is where we meet the underbelly of society, headed by Christian Slater as the racist restaurant manager who rules with an iron fist. Laurence Fishburne’s African-American head chef is the wise old owl who’s managed to carve his niche in society, while Freddy Rodriguez’s Mexican bus boy is still struggling to find his voice.

Presiding over them all is William H. Macy as the benevolent hotel manager, yet even he is far from perfect, concealing an affair from his wife (Sharon Stone) with a pretty switchboard operator played by Heather Graham.

In many ways, Bobby himself is the omnipotent deity in Estevez’s film, offering hope and guidance to the melting pot of society that threatens to bubble over at any moment.

Yet, interestingly, he also remains an aloof figure who’s never integrated into the film – existing only in fragments of real news footage that Estevez weaves into the seemingly disparate storylines as he steers them towards a unifying crescendo.

Style and substance

Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and Paul Haggis’ Crash before it, Bobby’s interlinked stories and multi-narrative structure allows the audience access to numerous points of view. It is through these snapshots that Estevez is able to explore his central themes, many of which have chilling parallels in contemporary society.

In June 1968, the American economy is at breaking point, the unpopular war in Vietnam continues to rumble on, and Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead just two months earlier, sparking six days of race riots and violent clashes that spread through the country like wildfire.

Get on the bus: Bobby is set at an election party in the Ambassador Hotel, Los AngelesCredit:
Rex Features

Yet it’s the emblematic quality of some of Estevez’s characters that causes them to become unstuck. With many of the protagonists devised to address particular issues, they feel two-dimensional at times, while at other points the dialogue feels obvious.

Teeth are on edge when enthusiastic campaign staffer Dwayne slams the phone down and informs us that democracy isn’t working for California’s black communities. Similarly, moments before the assassination scene, it feels awkward when wealthy socialite Samantha tells us that Andy Warhol was shot the day before.

Labour of love

Estevez’s vanity project, and nod to Robert Altman, was seven years in the making, and was inspired by a chance meeting in 1967 with Kennedy himself when the actor was five. “That’s when my journey with him began,” he later recounted. The audience's journey with Estevez’s Bobby is certainly memorable and, in turn, emotional, even if it didn’t stir “new dreams” among politicians as Estevez hoped.

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